fathers and sons
by blossom in ribcage
Summary: It's twisted beyond fixing. All they can do is live with it.


Your mouth tastes like smoke and blood. It's always tasted like smoke and blood, and it probably always will, except now you've added two-day-old liquor to the mix. The beer bottle condenses in the summer heat, lazily dripping against your leg, as you sit on your father's porch; you don't bother to wipe it off, though, or raise it to your lips again. There's a magic level of drunkenness ideal for setting foot in this house— enough to numb the dread, but not to the point where it'll dull your reflexes. You'll have to feel it eventually. Goddamn. You'll have to feel it eventually.

You don't want to go inside, and ain't you fucked when your old man's the best option you've got, fresh out of another round in the pen. Tim's place is good for nabbing some mother's little helper, but not much else, with his bitch sister hanging around and his revolving door of nutjob stepdads. Curtises' makes you want to puke whenever you walk into the living room and Mom's not there. Last time you were at Buck's, he threw your duffel bag onto the lawn and said unless you had thirty dollars of back rent, plus interest, you could just go sleep under a bridge—

oh, who are you kidding. He's not your best option by a long, long shot. You'd be better off crashing with Johnny and praying his dad's the happy kind of plastered, not the two-by-four beating kind.

So why are you here?

The lock's broken, you discover as you throw the bottle into the yard and shove the door open, and then you almost piss yourself when you hear a loud bark. Great. Just fucking great. He's back on raising pitbulls, anything to avoid an honest day's work, and fighting them in abandoned lots— he keeps those things in the house and treats them better than he ever treated his son. They scare the shit out of you, even though you're Dallas fucking Winston and not a pussy that gets scared. He wouldn't set them on you, you keep telling yourself, and then you examine the faint, puckered scars on the inside of your left wrist, silvery in the dim light. Cigarette burns. You thought that he'd never do that, either, and then the uppers happened.

You find him tightening a makeshift tourniquet around his arm on the couch, needle in hand, searching for a vein that hasn't collapsed. He's gone to seed, you think, your lip curling as you absorb the stained wifebeater, the stubble, the mangy, black-gummed dog panting at his feet. You remember when you were five, ten, even fifteen, how he loomed above you as the one guy whose ass you could never kick, but now all you can manage to feel for him is pure contempt. Maybe you're a wreck too, maybe you dropped out of school to deal and can't think of the last day you spent sober, but if you ever end up like _this_ , you'll stick a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.

"Dad," you almost say, but the word never comes out right. Soda's dad was the closest you ever had to one, and he's dead now. "Norm. I'm back."

Needle drops to join a pile on the floor, tourniquet slackens. "The fuck are you doin' here?"

It's always like this, every single fucking time, and honestly, you're kind of an idiot. Talking out both sides of your mouth. _You're better off since that sonuvabitch bounced, Two-Bit. You'd think you could take a damn hint after getting kicked out again, Steve, and quit coming back where you ain't wanted. Johnny, I don't give two shits what he says, he's gonna beat your ass once he's in the bottle._ But you're a massive hypocrite, guilty as charged, and a tiny part of you still wants—

"I said, the fuck are you doin' here?"

Your spit hangs in your mouth, as thick as tar, gluing your tongue down. Last time you were here was July, right before you went inside, the heat igniting his fuse like a struck match— you'd left pissing blood for a week and so angry you thought your head would explode. It's the end of September now. "I was in the cooler. Just got out."

He likes hearing about your failures, as long as they don't bring the law to his front door. "The hell'd you do now?" he asks, the corner of his mouth twisted up. "Shoot somebody?"

"Got caught sellin' again," you admit, your jaw clenched so tight it hurts— selling dope to idiots like your old man, a more lucrative business than jockeying or your short-lived stint in construction. Six months, with a warning that you didn't have long before it was Big Mac and not reform school, young man, so you'd better straighten yourself out. (Well, hey, you'd kept your nose clean and had it shaved down to three— your wiseass probation officer says that you seem to only get your shit together while in-car-cer-at-ed, so maybe they should've kept you longer, but you didn't punch him out. Ain't ever worth punching a cop, no matter how tempting.)

"Nothin' can scare you straight, can it?" he says with a snort, scratching the dog behind the ears. Of course he likes it more than you. It makes him money, and you cost him, which is why it stays and you go. "God knows I never fuckin' could."

He used to pull off his belt and pin you across the edge of the kitchen table or the couch or the bathtub, and make your ass pay the kind of hell that left you welted and bruised for weeks, running off to lick your wounds in the streets. Sometimes he didn't even have to do it, and the clink of the buckle or a punch stopped an inch before your face was enough to cow you. But you're nearly eighteen now, a man. Anything he does to you, you'll unleash on him tenfold, so you just smirk in response. "Am I supposed to give a fuck?" he asks after a moment. "That really what you came here to tell me?" Then his eyes narrow. "You want cash, you're shit outta luck. Bank's closed."

"No," you say, jamming your hands into your pockets. You don't have a ton of principles, but not taking money from Norm is one of them; you'll eat food out of dumpsters before you rely on him and his animal abuse again. "Just thought you might wanna know. Since you're supposed to be my daddy an' all."

"You look just like your mama," he says, spitting on the floor. You already knew; there's blurry, faded photographs of her at your cousins' house in Windrixville, school skirt, bored expression. You wonder how bad her home life must've been for her to think running off with Norm was the better option, or if she was some spoiled East Side princess looking for adventure. Either way, she still died with a needle in her arm, you guess. "Then you open your mouth, and you sound just like me. That's how I figured out you're really mine."

"I've been in the cooler six times since we got to Tulsa." More in New York, starting from age ten, and you're almost desperate enough for a scrap of concern to bring it up. You're a masochist, a sucker for pain, and there's no pain sharper than this. "That ever bother you none?"

Here's the part where he denies it, renders the past seventeen years invalid. Instead he's silent, like he's mulling it over. "A man's supposed to be proud of his son, right?" he finally asks the shadows on the walls, then barks out a laugh. "But you ain't shit to me. You could be in jail or dead in a car wreck or drunk in a gutter— that ain't my fuckin' problem."

You punch him in the jaw. It's a beautiful, glorious punch that's also completely useless, because he's got your skinny, prison-fed ass in a headlock the second your fist collides with its target. "This your fuckin' problem, cocksucker?" you demand anyway, struggling as hard as you can against him, pure bloodlust running through your veins. Bloodlust. Bloodlust. Blood is the only thing connecting the two of you anymore, and it's not enough. Blood didn't stop him from leaving you alone to get high when you were five, didn't stop him from beating the hell out of you, didn't stop him from abandoning you whenever you needed him most. You wish you could filter it, remove his filth and just leave what your mama gave you, even though it's a childish, stupid thing to wish. "This your problem now?"

Norm should've died instead. When you were younger, Soda's dad once showed you the bullet wound near his hip and asked if you still thought running with gangs was worth the risk, then smacked you across the rear and said you were a good kid, even if you were a dumbass sometimes, so you'd better start acting like it. Your old man told you that you ain't worth _shit_ to him, and the worst part is, he never had to open his mouth to say that.

"Get the fuck outta here." Trying to break your arm (again) is the closest he'll ever get to embracing his broken boy, isn't it. Almost his version of 'I love you.' "You think you're enough of a man to whoop your own daddy? Get out, or I'mma have Bruiser take a good chunk from you first."

You look down at the dog, its ugly, rotting teeth bared, and you can't even hate it; here's Norm's ideal son, one that obeys because it doesn't know any better, attacks on command and then comes crawling back to its master. Here's everything you can't be. "I'm gone," you say, violently wrenching free, breathing hard. "You ain't gonna see me no more."

Silence. He's already picked up the needle and pulled the tourniquet tight again, ready to forget he ever had a son. How you wish you could do the same; rewrite your past, erase it, make something less fucked up. It's taken you a long time to realize that you can run and run and run, but you can't leave Norm behind as easily as he left you.

You walk out onto the front lawn again. Bend over gasping, choking on something you can't name, until you hurl your guts out all over the dead grass. Now your mouth tastes like smoke and blood and old liquor and stomach acid, and you've still got nowhere to go.


End file.
